High-fidelity prototyping of interactive systems can be formal too

Abstract

The design of safety critical systems calls for advanced software engineering models, methods and tools in order to meet the safety requirements that will avoid putting human life at stake. When the safety critical system encompasses a substantial interactive component, the same level of confidence is required towards the human-computer interface. Conventional empirical or semi-formal techniques, although very fruitful, do not provide sufficient insight on the reliability of the human-system cooperation, and offer no easy way to, for example, quantitatively compare two design options. The aim of this paper is to present a method, with supporting tools and techniques, for engineering the design and development of usable user interfaces for safety-critical applications. More precisely we present the Petshop environment which is a Petri net based tool for the design specification, prototyping and validation of interactive software. In this environment models of the interactive application can be interactively modified and executed. This is used to support prototyping phases (when the models and the interactive application evolve significantly to meet late user requirements for instance) as well as in the operation phase (after the system is deployed). The use of the description technique (the ICO formalism) supported by PetShop is presented on a multimodal ground segment application for satellite control and more precisely how prototyping can be performed at the various levels of the architecture of interactive systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.